The use of physical display devices for facilitating meetings is becoming increasingly popular. Depending on the environment, a physical display device may be one of a number of types (e.g., liquid crystal displays (LCDs), cathode ray tubes (CRTs), interactive displays such as interactive whiteboards (IWBs) or other display panels etc.) and/or different sizes and/or screen resolutions. Typically, however, a physical display device is provided with video data from the video card in a single computing device such as a personal computer or the like, and positioned in a meeting room so as to be visible to all meeting participants. Such a physical display device is used to present video data such as slides, video, photographs, charts, documents, application windows and the like for use during presentations and for discussion. In meetings having multiple contributors, multiple physical display devices may be used and each connected in various manners and according to various configurations with participants' respective source computers.
Multi-monitor computer systems may be provided in various configurations, such as those in which multiple physical display devices are connected to a single computing device, or in which each physical display device is connected to its own computing device, for example. Multi-monitor computer systems provide an increased display area for computer programs, and are becoming increasingly popular. In order to accommodate multiple physical display devices, video cards in many personal computers have multiple sockets or ports to receive cables from more than one physical display device. Alternatively, some personal computers have multiple video cards to receive cables from more than one physical display device. In either case, video data generated by the video card(s) of the computing device in response to execution of one or more computer programs is output to one or more physical display device for display. Other multi-monitor computer systems have networked physical display devices where the physical display devices are connected via a wireless or wired network and video data is provided to the physical display devices via the network connection for display.
It is often desirable during a meeting to coordinate and control upon which physical display devices certain users are permitted to display their video data. This can be done by predefining a set of destination addresses corresponding to physical display devices and using lookup tables to associate the respective IP addresses of user's devices with those of physical display devices in the network, or by user's devices specifying IP addresses of physical display devices or their controllers either directly or after having queried over the network as to which physical display devices are available. However it can be rather time-consuming to set up predefined lookup tables for each meeting, and flexibility for participants with such schemes is limited. On the other hand, enabling network users to send messages via their devices through the network to query as to which devices are available for display and make their own connections without restriction can pose security concerns. This is because the physical display devices are often part of a larger local or wide area network via which users that are authorized to use the network in general could gain access to the physical display devices meant for use by others during a particular meeting.
As will be appreciated, improvements in establishing communications sessions in a network for display of video data are desired. It is therefore an object of the present invention at least to provide a novel method for establishing communications sessions for displaying video data, and a novel system employing the method.